The most inappropriate movies/TV you watched with your baby

Every once in a while, I’ll hear someone talk about stuff they remember when they were a baby. Very often it’s a full-of-themselves celebrity type, usually on “The Tara Banks Show.” “I was looking out my crib and wanted my blanket, but I didn’t know any words!” But sometimes it’s someone completely who I know and respect. I shudder a little when I hear these recollections, feel really guilty and then consider calling CPS on myself. Because when my older son was a baby, I watched some truly horrendous television.

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That’s some ****ing bad parenting, ****sucker.

Not “Real Housewives of New Jersey” bad, or “Small Wonder” bad. More like Al Swearengen-at-the-Gem Saloon horrendous. Technically, we were watching critically-acclaimed quality television. Most of my favorite programs tend to do pretty well in Tim Goodman’s power rankings. But they’re also filled with people who say the word “c***sucker.” And marry three wives. And steal each other’s drug caches, kill them and use nail guns to seal their corpses in abandoned row houses.

Our firstborn, now 5 years old, wasn’t a good sleeper when he was a baby. My wife took care of him late at night, and I often got up with him for the 4 a.m. feeding. Our routine was to sit down on the couch, as I found a movie on television or raided the cache in our TiVo. (Worst push prize ever …) We also took him to several R-rated baby brigade movie screenings, although in our defense, he was usually in a car carrier and not facing the film. So he only heard the completely inappropriate things happening onscreen.

Below are the four worst things I watched in front of my infant son. For the record, I now regret this, although at the time didn’t think it was that bad. Yours in the comments …

4. “Platoon”: I remember being really excited when this came on at 4:30 one morning. I watched the entire thing — nearly three hours including commercials — before my wife got up. My infant son was asleep most of the time. And in any case as a 5-year-old he definitely is more of a Willem Dafoe type than a Tom Berenger, so I think he got the right message from the Oliver Stone picture. We’ll find out if he ever tries to frag me in my sleep.

3. “Deadwood”: In my defense, there’s some American history in this one. And there’s a strong anti-gambling message in the Season 1 Wild Bill Hickok storyline. My wife wasn’t too happy when she found out I had watched most of the first season of “Deadwood” with my son on my lap, but she relaxed a little when his first word was “dada,” and not “c***sucker” or “San Francisco mother f*****.” More than anything, I’m worried that he’ll never get proper closure. HBO and David Milch really screwed up the ending of this series.

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I don’t think they’re setting up a playdate.

2. “Crash”:The Paul Haggis “Crash,” not the one where James Spader and Holly Hunter like to have sex after getting in car accidents. (Jesus, I’m not a total animal.) We saw this at a Baby Brigade screening at the old Parkway Speakeasy in Oakland. My son was maybe three months old, and we turned the car carrier he was sleeping in away from the screen. Still not a great idea for his first-ever movie, considering how much the N-word was thrown around. Like the Academy, we should have picked “Brokeback Mountain.”

1. “Oz”: I’m not sure if I was old enough to be watching this HBO prison drama, which had to average one prison rape and about five stabbings per episode. I distinctly remember this show being the wake-up call that changed my father/son viewing habits, when a particularly heinous series of events on the show was loud enough to make my son stir. From then on I stuck to sports and Reese Witherspoon movies.

What did you watch with your infant sons/daughters?

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes has nothing to do with parenting. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub.